Relationships

Very few documents stand alone. Instead, a document is usually part of a collection of documents, each connected by one or several of the hypertext strands we describe in this chapter. One document may be a part of several collections, linking to some documents and being linked to by others. Readers move among the document families as they follow the links that interest them.

When you link two documents, you establish an explicit relationship between them. Conscientious authors use the rel attribute of the <a> tag to indicate the nature of the link. In addition, two other tags may be used within a document to further clarify the location of a document within a document family and its relationship to the other documents in that family. These tags, <base> and <link>, are placed within the body of the <head> tag. [<head>, 3.7.1]

The <base> Header Element

As we previously explained, URLs within a document can be either absolute (with every element of the URL explicitly provided by the author) or relative (with certain elements of the URL omitted and supplied by the browser). Normally, the browser fills in the blanks of a relative URL by drawing the missing pieces from the URL of the current document. You can change that with the <base> tag.

The <base> tag should appear only in the document ...

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